A Performance of Gender in Three Acts

This diary began as a post on MAJeff’s post.  

You should read him anyways, but you should surely read it before you read anything below.  

Jeff’s post is a good example of bringing what is otherwise academese to the mythical “educated non-specialist” that we all like to be, and even the specialists who checked in voiced their approval of Jeff’s precis of ideas that can and do consume careers.  

I’d like to respond both to the theory and its application as presented, especially this:  

Well, that’s not the only conversation that was going on, there.  So much more has been said, even on the explicit and rational level than has been heard.  Instead, too many of us have been performing our expected roles.  

And we’re supposed to be the ones who can think out of those boxes, right?  
One of the difficulties in thinking clearly about how we recreate our gender(ed) identities from moment to moment is the profusion of different one around us, at least for those of us living in a cosmopolitan environment.  

When the notion that gendered power might have negative implications for the gender in power finally found a popularizing work (long after the observation itself had passed the ‘no duh’ phase for those of us with even a passing involvement in gender), I was surprised (because I was still kinda young) at the hatred it elicited from the very popular audience that was supposed to receive it.  This was before I learned that the problem with worrying about what people think is that most of them don’t (and don’t want to).  

How could feminists be such hypocrites, these idiots ranted, to say that masculinity hurt the same men who supposedly dominated society?  This, after trashing men for so long!  

This was wrong on so many levels.  

1. feminists are popularly imagined to be men-haters because Limbaugh says so.  No other reason.  Sure, you can find some pretty reductionist, essentializing bullshit from women who apparently have problems with men, but so what?  You can find people working out their personal problems down at Jiffy Lube.  Who gives a fuck?  
2. the popular response also ignored that just across the highway, over on the other side of town, or among a different generation or cohort, gender could be being acted out in a very different way.  

There are plural masculinities and femininities because we bring different ones here from all over the world and because some of us are trying to change them.  That makes for a confusing world, which is why academics get paid the big bucks…

KOS’ initial comment was incredible loaded and imho totally stupid.  And yet I knew what he was talking about in the same way that I know what people are talking about when they trash academics, for instance, even though these are only stereotypes.  In fact, the set KOS was talking about is quite ironically NOT the women’s studies type, in my experience.  People who actually study this stuff have a tendency to know something about it.  As with much knowledge, however, a little is a dangerous thing, and too many are about as well informed as your average ditto-head.  

My conservative friends (a number which shrinks every day) have a hard time believing that I only ever encountered their stereotypical PC in undergrads, and not among the serious ones.  Not among grad students.  Not among faculty.  Nope.  The only ‘apologize for being [insert non subaltern status here], since I can conceive of a rhetorical connection between your actions/words/silences and the suffering of [insert subaltern status here]’ idiots I ever ran into were dilettantes.  

You know:  poseurs.  One of them grew up to be Wonkette…

At the time, I was a new grad student working under a lesbian feminist scholar who was quantifying liturgical elements of radical Catholics’ wills during the upheavals of the Wars of Religion as a way of writing a history of the body in a time of all-out ideological combat.  After squinting at 16th century paleography puzzling through modern and premodern languages, entering data in a proprietary database, and having my boss (who doesn’t grasp that not everyone is as brilliant as she is) babble at me in her Tower of Babble codeswitch dialect of academese, the half-understood and soggy repackagings of Victorian sensibilities, or bizarre inversions of male chauvinism into a derivative female chauvinism were, as “feminism” or any other idea worthy of the suffix “-ism,” around which I had spent my adolescent life were now simply beneath contempt.  

In fact, I couldn’t stop laughing.  It was like learning about neural plasticity on Oprah or sovereign immunity on Limbaugh.  

Absent referents?  Whatever.  

These people weren’t any better informed than the half-assed ranters writing letters to the editor about “feminazis,” they had just accessorized their identities with some other handful of words they clearly didn’t understand.  These were ideologues, only they were leftists.  They were no better informed and were just as aggressive.  Which was I supposed to be?  The bad guy or the good guy in their dimestore morality tale?  

And who were they?  There was nothing progressive, or even self-conscious, about these people’s behavior.  It’s easy, for instance, to put on a Che shirt and talk about injustice in Latin America, but what are you doing about it and how do you keep that kind of victimization from happening in your own life?  For these particular ideologues, the rhetoric of a pseudo-feminism seemed to function as a sort of rationalization that relieved them of having to make the changes I would expect from a progressive person battling back against an unjust world.  No.  Same behavior, different rationalization.  Women who had a penchant for picking out men who were utterly unfit for the relationships they had planned for them could simply invert medieval notions of gender roles and write off all men as sexually driven, irrational, and unreliable (see?  Now you don’t need to watch Sex in the City, you know every plot and character!).  

Repeat if necessary.  

Or, more comfortingly, all sex (and the gender with which one associated it) could be reframed as a pathology.  When in doubt, men could also be dismissed as too rational, rationality being mere “male hysteria,” which is an easy way to get out of having to frame rational arguments or remember facts and sources.  Alternately, one could haunt oneself with the phantasms of women’s suffering, real or imagined, here or elsewhere, now or in the past, visiting vicariously what they could just as easily leave (unlike the actual, suffering women), but which also entitled them to challenge any not dreamily preoccupied with the non-present outrage about which they were materially doing nothing.  A moth-eaten, diaphanous shroud of conjured miseries did double duty as veil and blunt instrument.  

Now, I have seen every one of these pointless exercises repeated over vegetarianism, race, homophobia, and I’ve seen the same regurgitation of victim ploys be picked up by the right.  Potboiler popular feminism is not a unique phenomenon.  Plenty of people subscribe to an ideology they can’t be bothered to understand, dumbing it down to mere cargo cult status, just so long as it reinforces how they’ve accessorized their socioeconomic status and gives them fancy words to throw at their enemies.  

So, when I saw what KOS said, I knew immediately what he meant.  He was dreading the inevitable.  He’d spoke of the devil, invoked his own testicle-clipping doom, if only in his own imagination, the product of years of having to deal with shrill poseurs.  “Oh, shit.  Not those people again.  Real world trolls:  you know exactly what they’re going to say because they’ve been screeching at you for fucking years!”  

I also knew that he

1. didn’t need to say anything in the first place
2. had framed it backwards (women’s studies students aren’t his problem)
3. was probably going to piss off a lot of people who were even the people he was talking about
4. had just provided Powerwhine, etc., with a lot of content.  

So, where are we now?  

Ordinarily, I would say that people engaged in this kind of grudge match deserve each other, only the people around them don’t.  But in this case, I think we’ve got two groups of people who aren’t even addressing each other, but rather who are attacking some imaginary other.  

KOS refuses to perform the neo-masculinity demanded by pseudo-feminists:  outrage has been pronounced; you may now grovel and beg forgiveness.  If you cannot do this, you are the wrong kind of man.  Others have done this.  They are the right kind of man.  

Or perhaps his upbringing in another culture makes him genuinely hostile to or dismissive of the concerns of the color and class of women who are likely to be online anyway.  Theirs is a narrow band of possible femininities among many, most of which are submerged by cultural restrictions and/or economic limitations.  

You are two fragments, flapping at each other in an indifferent sea of possibilities and identities.  Get over yourselves.  All of you.  Any politically useful coalition on this or any other issue is going to cut across these cultures and their performances.  A lack of respect and a politically naiive sense of misplaced priorities has sundered natural allies.  The only beneficiary is the Right, for whom rigidity and submission, under the pretense of tradition and economics, are the norm.  

Do you think you’ll get a better deal from them?